Self-Help Books by Professionals:

Written by Pam

Carolyn Ainscough and Kay Toon, Breaking Free: A Self-help Guide for Adults Who Were Sexually Abused as Children (Tucson: Fisher Books, 1993, also published in Great Britain by Sheldon Press).

The authors of this book are therapists in England who found that sexual abuse was much more common in their client population than they had expected. They wrote this book partly to have something to give to clients who were on a waiting list for therapy. It is strong mostly on cognitive and behavioral suggestions for how to manage the immediate problems caused by survivor issues, though they always say that it is also necessary to go back and work through the past.

I think it would be a useful book if you are looking for help managing immediate problems, so long as you don't expect it to tell you about the deeper issues. It has an odd section on dissociation, which they call blanking out. They talk about how some survivors can blank out and then come out of the state and be confused about where they are, but there is no mention of the possibility of alters or multiple personalities or DID.

C. W. Duncan, The Fractured Mirror: Healing Multiple Personality Disorder (Deerfield Beach, FL: Health Communications, 1994).

There isn't anything terribly wrong with this book, but I didn't like it. Duncan tries very hard to be supportive, but he still gives me the impression that he thinks he has all the answers. If you aren't satisfied with your therapist's approach this book might be a good source of other ideas. It is a good popular summary of modern (or at least early 1990s) research on how to treat DID, but don't take it as gospel. For example, he believes that hypnosis is essential to successful treatment of DID (it is not, though it is helpful to some).

J. Patrick Gannon, Soul Survivors: A New Beginning for Adults Abused as Children (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989).

This book is full of detailed information and does personalize it by following the stories of six survivors. It is a good source for information and ideas, but I felt that he had too rigid an idea of the process of healing.

The first sections of the book deal with coming to understand that you were abused and how it has affected your life. Gannon then divides the healing process into 21-steps, though he says everyone doesn't follow the same order. He gives a lot of attention to inner-child work, but seems to reserve the DID diagnoses only for extreme cases. He does believe in the value of 12-step and other self-help groups.

Wendy Maltz, The Sexual Healing Journey: A Guide for Survivors of Sexual Abuse (New York: Harper Perennial, 1991.)

This book is very highly recommended by everyone whom I have seen mention it. I am taking it very slowly, so I am posting it here before I finish it, but so far I think very highly of it. Very gentle and open to the idea that different people follow different paths.

Alan Marshall, People in Pieces: Multiple Personality in Milder Forms Greater Numbers (Highland City, FL: Rainbow Books, 1993).

I ought to like this book. It is about how you can be multiple without being like Sybil. But I don't. I feel like he hasn't gotten his own thinking clear. He tries to define something he calls 'Ego State Disorder' as a separate category from DID. But the more I read his examples, the more they sound like DID. In the end, I decided not to loan this book to a family member because I felt it would encourage minimizing (particularly because he states that the milder disorder, he defines, is caused by milder abuse).

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